Facebook comments: now with picture embedding

Your Facebook flame wars are about to get a whole lot more visual. The social networking giant has announced that people will now be embed images when commenting on someone’s status.

The news was first revealed by devianART’s Product Marketing Manager Dan Leveille, before being confirmed by Facebook.

According to Facebook, the feature is currently being rolled out on the web before landing on mobile in the near future, although you’ll be able to view the images on the social network’s native apps from the get go. According to The Next Web, the feature was built during one of Facebook’s hackathons by Bob Baldwin, who wrote on his Facebook page:

When I’m talking with a friend, sometimes showing a photo helps me tell a story much better than words alone. If we’re hanging out in person, I can show a photo from my phone, but on Facebook I’d have to post a link to a photo. Now, you’ll be able to attach a photo directly when posting a comment. I hope this will make threads with friends more expressive and engaging.

For the moment, the feature only seems to work with profile pages and not events.

Once you’ve embedded an image into your comment, you’ll be able to add a message to go with it. At this stage though, it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to add multiple images to each comment. It also doesn’t look like you’ll be able to add animated GIFs, as JPEGs and PNGs are currently the only formats that are widely supported.